Sunday, August 01, 2010

As you may know, in July 2000, Borland Software Corp. (formerly known as Inprise) releasedthe beta version of InterBase 6.0 as open source. The community of waiting developers andusers preferred to establish itself as an independent, self-regulating team rather thansubmit to the risks, conditions and restrictions that the company proposed for communityparticipation in open source development. A core of developers quickly formed a projectand installed its own source tree on SourceForge. They liked the Phoenix logo which was tohave been ISC's brandmark and adopted the name "Firebird" for the project.So, July 31 2000, the Firebird Project was born.

The Firebird project has a lot of active members. Of course, that doesn'tmean that there are all developers working directly on Firebird code. Some peoplevolunteer for various tasks that surround the core development work, such asdocumentation, building, testing and packaging on various platforms, mentoring andproviding technical advice, web site maintenance etc. Many members are dedicated to aparticular sub-project, or to particular problem area. The Firebird Team consists of manyskilled and enthusiastic members including primary Interbase developers, former Interbaseengineers, experienced Interbase users, and complete newcomers keen to lend a hand in anyway they can. This diverse, multi-talented, and ever-growing community is our greatestasset -- one that guarantees a very healthy future for the Firebird Project.

In 2002, Firebird 1.0 was released, and the Firebird Foundation was created to support theproject. Firebird 1.5 came in 2004, Firebird 2.0 in 2008.The project won Source-Forge award in 2007 and 2009.As a 10th birthday gift, we are about to release Firebird 2.5 and the work on Firebird 3.0started.

Firebird Project is a lively community, open to everyone. We want this community to be anice place for both newcomers and current members, where everyone feels comfortable andaccepted. In the Firebird Community, participants from all over the world come together tocreate a Free Software RDBMS. This is made possible by the support, hard work, andenthusiasm of thousands of people, including those who create and use Firebird.

As you see, the Firebird community is well alive - the recent Firebird Day in Brazil hadmore than 500 attendees -, and 10 years after, it is really a challenge that we can beproud to took up.

I would like to thanks all the past and actual core developers, contributors, sponsors,Foundation members for that.

Taking up the challenge of the project growth is our main concern for the next years.Obviously, to make an even more successful project, we need more contributors, moresponsors, more Foundation members.

There some key points that are on the way.

I would thanks the "MindTheBird!" initiative. It's a good point to have Firebirdambassadors around the world. The Firebird project will work in coordination with"MindTheBird!" leaders to see how to consolidated this.

The Firebird web site will be revamped, with the help of past donors. This new web sitewill be a place were you can find more information, and ways to contribute to the project.

We always need people to write code, documentation, review and triage bug reportsubmissions, maintain the servers that run the Firebird Project and create newapplications to make development of Firebird go smoother, develop marketing strategy topromote the usage and support of Firebird worldwide, support other users, give money tothe Foundation, setting up Firebird events ...

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Join LiveMeetingDescription from Marco Cantu:Since many Delphi developers use Firebird, Embarcadero recently added a native and specific Firebird driver to its dbExpress architecture.In this session I’ll offer an overview of how this driver works in terms of accessing to data and metadata, cover some of the alternative Delphi database access solutions for Firebird, and talk about the status of Delphi and of its relationship with the open source database server.